Tag: 1st amendment

Democrats Can’t Take A Joke, So They’re Trying To Outlaw Free Speech

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., wants to make one thing perfectly clear: She has never said Sydney Sweeney has “perfect [breasts].” Nor has she accused her fellow Democrats of being “too fat to wear jeans or too ugly to go outside.”

The Minnesota leftist attempted to clear the air earlier this week in a New York Times opinion piece headlined, “Amy Klobuchar: What I Didn’t Say About Sydney Sweeney.” 

Klobuchar wrote that she is the victim of a hoax, a “realistic deepfake.” Some trickster apparently put together and pushed out an AI-generated video in which Klobuchar appears to make (hilariously) outrageous comments about Sweeney’s American Eagle jeans ad — after liberals charged that the commercial is racist and an endorsement of eugenics. 

‘Party of Ugly People’

The doctored Klobuchar appears to be speaking at a Senate committee hearing, She demands Democrats receive “representation.” Of course, the satirical video has gone viral. 

“If Republicans are going to have beautiful girls with perfect ti**ies” in their ads, we want ads for Democrats, too, you know?” the fake Klobuchar asserts in the vid. “We want ugly, fat bitches wearing pink wigs and long-ass fake nails being loud and twerking on top of a cop car at a Waffle House ‘cause they didn’t get extra ketchup.”

“Just because we’re the party of ugly people doesn’t mean we can’t be featured in ads, okay?” the AI Amy implores. “And I know most of us are too fat to wear jeans or too ugly to go outside, but we want representation.” 

She appears — and sounds — so sincere.  But Klobuchar wants you to know it certainly was not her saying such “vulgar and absurd” things. That’s why she’s urging Congress to pass laws to ban such AI videos, which would be as absurd as social justice warriors calling American Eagle white supremacists for paying a blue jeans-clad, beautiful actress to say she has great jeans. 

Any such law would certainly and rightly be challenged in court. 

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Millions of immigrants could now be scrutinized for ‘anti-Americanism’ and ‘antisemitism’

The Trump administration is making a drastic change to how it decides which immigrants can receive certain benefits.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which falls under the Department of Homeland Security, is changing its policies so its employees are required to consider “circumstances where an alien has endorsed, promoted, supported, or otherwise espoused the views of an anti-American or terrorist organization or group,” according to the document.

The document said those circumstances could include “antisemitic terrorism, antisemitic terrorist organizations, and antisemitic ideologies,” with no further specifics.

The change could impact millions of immigrants who are not citizens and deal with the agency, for issues including changing their immigration status or applying for a change of status. Consequences for expressing anti-Americanism or antisemitism could include a denial of whatever benefit the individual applied for, like a change of status, or a visa renewal.

“They’re saying that they can broadly use their discretion to deny people who have been involved in any kind of anti-American activity,” said Matt Cameron, a local immigration attorney.

“There’s no definition of antisemitism in the law,” he added. “We’ve seen with Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, that the definition of ‘antisemitic’ has been expanded to really anyone who opposes what Israel is doing in Gaza.”

Attorney Mahsa Khanbabai represents Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish Tufts doctoral student who was detained by ICE agents for co-authoring an op-ed urging her university to stop funding Israeli companies supporting the war in Gaza. She has since been released as she continues deportation proceedings.

“We’re waiting to see what further guidance the administration is going to be providing to its immigration officers as they try to decide what is anti-American or antisemitic in terms of adjudicating a person’s benefits application,” said Khanbabai, who is based in Massachusetts.

The limitations the Trump administration is imposing on immigrants’ First Amendment rights is playing out in court, but attorneys say this policy change is a new way to limit immigrants’ freedom of expression.

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California Content Law Design Code Faces Free Speech Clash

Efforts to implement California’s Age-Appropriate Design Code continue to face resistance from both the tech industry and digital civil liberties groups, who argue that the law’s restrictions violate constitutional protections and would compel sweeping surveillance and censorship online.

The Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), which represents companies including Google, Amazon, Meta, and eBay, recently filed an amicus brief with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the case NetChoice v. Bonta.

Stephanie Joyce, the group’s senior vice president and director of its litigation center, condemned the legislation in blunt terms: “The Constitution prohibits the government from dictating what lawful content readers can see, and it extends that protection regardless of the reader’s age.

Though well-intentioned, California’s internet age restriction law is unconstitutional, and the court of appeals should affirm the decision to block it.”

The case marks the second time this legal clash has reached the Ninth Circuit. Previously, the court blocked only a portion of the law and returned the rest for further review.

Now, with renewed scrutiny, the court could determine whether the entire statute fails to withstand constitutional challenge.

NetChoice, an industry coalition that includes many of the same members as the CCIA, has led the charge against a wave of so-called “age assurance” laws.

These policies would require digital platforms to verify the ages of users and potentially restrict minors’ access to content deemed unsuitable. But free speech advocates warn the consequences would be broader and more dangerous than legislators admit.

Groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) have also weighed in with their own amicus brief, arguing that the law’s age estimation mandates undermine essential First Amendment rights. “CDT and EFF’s brief argues that the appeals court should uphold the injunctions solely on the basis of its overbroad, unconstitutional age verification requirement because that requirement is not severable from other provisions and should doom the entire statute.” The brief warns that such mandates not only chill access to lawful speech but also erode online anonymity and place users’ personal data at risk.

They also emphasize that minors’ ability to engage freely online is a critical part of their development and civic participation. “Social media helps minors develop their own ideas, learn to express themselves, and engage productively with others in our democratic public sphere,” the brief states.

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Court Rules New York County Denied Free Speech Rights to Pro-Life Advocates

A federal court has ruled that Westchester County, New York, violated the First Amendment rights of pro-life sidewalk counselors, marking a significant victory for free speech in a legal challenge brought by Thomas More Society attorneys. The decision in Hulinsky v. County of Westchester found the County liable for enacting an unconstitutional provision in its 2022 “Reproductive Health Care Facilities Access Act,” or Chapter 425, which restricted peaceful pro-life advocacy near abortion facilities.

The decision awards plaintiffs Oksana Hulinsky and Regina Molinelli nominal damages for the chilling of their life-saving sidewalk counseling for over two-and-half years as a result of the unconstitutional law, even though the County attempted to avoid liability by repealing the offending provision earlier this year.

This ruling builds on a March 14 decision that rejected the County’s attempt to dismiss Plaintiffs’ claims against part of Chapter 425 prohibiting so-called “interference” with abortion access “by deceptive means or otherwise”—a sweeping and unprecedented restriction adopted as part of the County’s furor over the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs.The Court rightly held the provision “criminalized large swaths of protected speech” on pain of jail, fines, and civil liability, flagrantly violating the First Amendment.

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The Israeli flag just became the only national flag illegal to burn in the United States. Yeah. I’m dead serious.

The Flag America Protects

This week in Washington, D.C., a federal judge made a ruling so shocking, so unprecedented, that it flips the First Amendment on its head. Judge Trevor N. McFadden declared that the Israeli flag — with the Star of David at its center — is not a political symbol at all, but a racial one.

He ruled that tearing it, grabbing it, desecrating it, even in the heat of protest, is not free expression but racial discrimination.

Think about that. In the United States, you can burn the American flag — the Supreme Court has said so for decades. But now, according to this ruling, burning or tearing the Israeli flag could make you guilty of racial hatred. The one national flag protected in American law today isn’t our own. It’s Israel’s.

You can burn the flags of all 50 states. You can torch the American flag all you want. You can burn the flags of the UK or France or Brazil or China.

But not Israel.

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President Trump’s War on “Woke AI” Is a Civil Liberties Nightmare

The White House’s recently-unveiled “AI Action Plan” wages war on so-called “woke AI”—including large language models (LLMs) that provide information inconsistent with the administration’s views on climate change, gender, and other issues. It also targets measures designed to mitigate the generation of racial and gender biased content and even hate speech. The reproduction of this bias is a pernicious problem that AI developers have struggled to solve for over a decade.

A new executive order called “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government,” released alongside the AI Action Plan, seeks to strong-arm AI companies into modifying their models to conform with the Trump Administration’s ideological agenda.

The executive order requires AI companies that receive federal contracts to prove that their LLMs are free from purported “ideological biases” like “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” This heavy-handed censorship will not make models more accurate or “trustworthy,” as the Trump Administration claims, but is a blatant attempt to censor the development of LLMs and restrict them as a tool of expression and information access. While the First Amendment permits the government to choose to purchase only services that reflect government viewpoints, the government may not use that power to influence what services and information are available to the public. Lucrative government contracts can push commercial companies to implement features (or biases) that they wouldn’t otherwise, and those often roll down to the user. Doing so would impact the 60 percent of Americans who get information from LLMs, and it would force developers to roll back efforts to reduce biases—making the models much less accurate, and far more likely to cause harm, especially in the hands of the government. 

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Mocking Elected Officials Is a Sign of a Healthy Democracy

There’s little question that President Donald Trump and his MAGA devotees can dish it out. Few things epitomize this populist movement more than its irreverence toward established institutions and its willingness to obliterate traditional standards of civility as it targets political enemies (and erstwhile friends during some internecine squabble). Trump’s social-media posts and statements are filled with invective and merciless mocking.

Trump’s schoolyard taunts rarely are sophisticated, as they frequently zero in on personal appearance. “He’s got the smallest neck I’ve ever seen. And the biggest head. We call him watermelon head. How can that big fat face stand on a neck that looked like this finger?” Trump said about Sen. Adam Schiff (D–Calif.). OK, I laughed when he called him “Adam Schifty Schiff,” but that’s only because it was so childishly stupid. That’s its appeal, I suppose.

One of Trump’s ugliest insults—dating to his first election—was when he mocked a disabled reporter by imitating his hand motions. The Wall Street Journal published a piece called, “The Art of the Insult.” We know this is how Trump operates. You can find hundreds of examples with a Google search or on his Truth Social account. Even the official White House account does this—when it’s not portraying Trump as a Kim Jong Un-style superhero.

It’s so very funny. Whenever anyone calls them out on this, Trump defenders act as if they are just so above it all. “Don’t you know the president is just trolling?” “Get a sense of humor.” “You must be suffering from TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome).” Yadda, yadda. In full disclosure, I greatly value humor and have mocked my share of politicians over the years. But I find bullying taunts to be crass and the sign of those displaying low human capital.

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Rutherford Institute Warns of Growing Threats to Religious Freedom, Challenges Ruling Denying Equal Treatment to Faith-Based Study Center

The Rutherford Institute is once again warning that if the government is allowed to deny freedom to one segment of the citizenry, it will eventually extend that tyranny to all citizens.

The Institute’s warning comes in response to a trial court’s decision in Christian Scholars Network, Inc. v. Montgomery County and Town of Blacksburg to deny equal treatment to a faith-based campus study center—despite providing tax-exempt status to other religious and charitable organizations offering similar services. At issue is whether the Christian Scholars Network (CSN)—a nonprofit religious organization that holds Bible studies, worship services, prayer meetings, and faith-based community events at its Bradley Study Center—is entitled to the same tax-exempt treatment granted to other religious groups. The case raises critical constitutional questions about religious liberty, government neutrality, and equal protection for nontraditional faith practices under the First Amendment and the Virginia Constitution.

“The First Amendment forbids the government from picking and choosing which religious groups are ‘worthy’ of constitutional protection,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “Whether it’s a church, a synagogue, a mosque, or a campus study center, the principle is the same: all faiths must be treated equally under the law. When the government starts elevating one form of religious practice over another, it sets a dangerous precedent that threatens freedom of belief for everyone.”

The Rutherford Institute’s lawsuit on behalf of Christian Scholars Network (CSN) comes amid growing concerns about governmental attempts to define religion narrowly, often to the detriment of minority or nontraditional faith communities. In 2019, CSN, a nonprofit ministry exempt from federal income tax by the IRS under section 501(c)(3), opened the Bradley Study Center near the Virginia Tech campus to cultivate a thoughtful exploration of the Christian faith and how one’s faith connects to their studies, work, and life. CSN uses the Study Center property for worship services, prayer meetings, Bible and theological book studies, and a Fellows Program for Virginia Tech students to meet weekly for religious discussions and fellowship. Despite fulfilling a comparable mission as other religious organizations, CSN was denied a property tax exemption on the grounds that its activities allegedly did not constitute “worship” and that it is not a “religious association” under Virginia law.

In coming to CSN’s defense, attorneys for The Rutherford Institute argue that the government’s refusal to recognize CSN’s religious character violates the Establishment Clause, fosters religious discrimination, and imposes a narrow, outdated definition of worship that excludes faith communities outside traditional, hierarchical structures. Institute attorneys also pointed to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Catholic Charities Bureau v. Wisconsin, which affirms the right of faith-based organizations to operate free from government discrimination based on the structure or style of their worship and ministry. After the trial court refused to grant CSN an exemption, ruling that CSN must be like a traditional church to receive the tax exemption, attorneys with The Rutherford Institute appealed to the Virginia Court of Appeals.

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Judge Strikes Down California Deepfake Censorship Law

California’s attempt to regulate political speech on major social media platforms has been blocked in federal court, with a judge ruling the state’s latest “deepfake” law clashes with protections already established by Congress.

Assembly Bill 2655 attempted to compel certain large platforms to track down and delete “materially deceptive content” about candidates, election officials, and officeholders.

Supporters described it as a safeguard against manipulated media. The companies targeted, including X and Rumble, argued it was an attempt to turn them into agents of government censorship.

Senior US District Judge John Mendez sided with the platforms and did not even need to reach the argument of constitutional free speech questions to strike down the measure.

He found the federal Communications Decency Act [CDA] already shields online services from punishment over third-party content.

“No parts of this statute are severable because the whole statute is preempted,” Mendez said in court. “No parts of A.B. 2655 can be salvaged.”

The ruling applies to the companies in the lawsuit, and his earlier order freezing enforcement of the law remains in effect statewide until he issues a formal opinion.

For Mendez, the law punished companies for doing something they are “clearly protected by [the CDA] from doing.”

The court also cast doubt on another state law, Assembly Bill 2839, which prohibits false or misleading digital communications aimed at election workers, officials, voting equipment, or candidates in the months leading up to an election. That measure is also on hold, and Mendez signaled he doubts it will survive judicial review.

“Anybody can sue,” he said. “I can sue. If I see the video, under this law, I can sue.” He warned that such a rule chills protected speech and noted the state had not shown it was using the least speech-restrictive approach possible.

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Trump admin drops Israel boycott conditions from disaster aid guidance after intense backlash

The Trump Administration on Monday dropped language from the Department of Homeland Security that would have denied disaster aid funding to cities and states that boycotted Israeli companies, following intense backlash from both sides of the aisle.

The DHS Standard Terms and Conditions on Monday morning, included the following statement:

“Discriminatory prohibited boycott means refusing to deal, cutting commercial relations, or otherwise limiting commercial relations specifically with Israeli companies or with companies doing business in or with Israel or authorized by, licensed by, or organized under the laws of Israel to do business.”

That language has since been removed from the DHS’s most up to date version. The original post with the Israel-related language may be found here.

The removal followed intense online backlash from right-wing and left-wing advocates online, many of whom deemed it evidence of Israeli capture of the American government.

“Denying American victims of natural disasters aid if they are insufficiently supportive of Israel. Absolute insanity,” wrote podcast Krystal Ball.

“I’ve never seen someone tank their legacy so fast. This is not America first and anyone advising him on this should be fired,” musician Alexandra Lains wrote.

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